The article sort of disses traditional landing guidance systems but misses the point of these. Specifically that such instrument approaches are used because one can’t see the runway at all. Thus a system that relies on cameras to land is academically interesting but not all that practical. Also with the advent of GPS-WAAS based LPV approaches one doesn’t need equipment on the field and a high precision 3D approach path can be created anywhere.

As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft a pilot friend of mine said to ask actual pilots if they’d get on board a fully self flying aircraft and you’d be hard pressed to find one. As he put it, the automation on planes is amazing and a big help but it does mess up and when it does the automation can crap out big time. For the foreseeable future there’s still no replacement for a qualified pilot at the controls ready to take over.

Finally there’s a lot of debate in the aviation community that too much automation actually decreases safety because pilots not flying enough manually lose skills. See the SFO accident with the Asiana airliner that crashed for no other reason than the ILS was down so they couldn’t fly with the autopilot. They crashed short of the runway on a simply manual landing in perfect weather because they couldn’t fly the plane properly!

The landing in the article was a really cool experiment though.